personally? i have an entirely different approach to it.

when i'm opening a brand new site, i don't really worry about "attracting that first member" or even whether we "look active" or not. in the case of the former, well, i'm going to pick up that first member eventually if i've been advertising (especially if i'm hitting up site searches since those tend to be p good at recruitment) and imo if someone's going to hold the fact that a brand new site doesn't have a bunch of posts when it opens against the site, well, they probably aren't the sort who takes chances on brand new sites in the first place.

personally, i more tend to approach it from the perspective of "okay, how am i going to try to convince these first few members to stick around?" obviously people are gonna ghost, but like...... imo i have a hard time faulting someone for ghosting because they made, say, a plucky adventuring commoner on a site where most of the characters on the site are wealthy nobility engaged in political shenanigans, for example. so i more try to have a variety of characters available to rp when i open, so that by the time someone shows up, i can immediately try to plot with them so they'll have an easier time getting invested enough in the site to stay. (and i know i personally appreciate this approach more from a member perspective too because goodness does it demotivate me when i join a site and it feels like i'm pulling teeth to get any scraps of plots tossed my way by the "merciful" deities that are the existing members.)

the approach is also not entirely a bad idea to keep in mind just.... in general, regardless of how old the site is, since uh. so many sites focus on recruitment and not a whole lot on retention, which i find such a shame because honestly, in my opinion, sites should be catering more to the members they have than the ones they might get, as it were. and y'know. it's a lot easier to keep someone who's already interested in what you're selling than convince someone entirely new to hear out your pitch. so. yeah.